New York City would be swallowed by the ocean. Tokyo and Shanghai, too, would vanish.
Sea levels stand to rise by a staggering 164 feet (50 meters) or more if the world goes for broke on fossil fuels, burning all its attainable resources. That's because the Antarctic Ice Sheet would melt entirely from the warming caused by those emissions, concludes a study published Friday in Science Advances. The researchers say their paper offers the first long-term look at how carbon dioxide emissions from oil, coal, and natural gas would affect the entire ice sheet.
"If we don't stop dumping our waste CO2 into the sky, land that is now home to more than billion people will one day be underwater," says study co-author Ken Caldeira, senior scientist at Stanford University's Carnegie Institution for Science. (See an interactive map of the world if all the ice melted.)
There's a bright side, sort of: The full melt would take about 10,000 years. However, at least 100 feet of the swell, as modeled in the paper from scientists in Germany, California, and the United Kingdom, would occur in this millennium, at a rate of more than an inch per year—a harrowing prospect, given that many coastal areas are already seeing land loss and flooding from much more modest sea level increases.